The return of King Coal

Farmers in central Illinois fight a new threat  a method of mining that will change their land forever

Montgomery County Board member Ed Helgen says it was a
big secret: No one came because no one knew. “There might have been six or eight people
there, but they wasn’t there for that,” he recalls of the board meeting in December 2004
when he landed on the losing end of the 18-2 vote. Not so, insists board Chairman Mike Havera. He says
that the county did everything by the book — legal notices in the
local newspaper, no closed-door meetings. “The manager of the Farm Bureau was there
— he never said a word that I know of,” Havera says. One thing is abundantly clear: The County Board that
night, quite literally, sold the ground out from under a whole lot of
farmers by conveying mineral rights for 120,000 acres to a West
Virginia-based coal-mining conglomerate. The farmers are, to put it mildly, really mad. A federal lawsuit has been filed and dismissed.
Hundreds of angry landowners have turned out for meetings aimed at quelling
fears, which hasn’t happened, and galvanizing opposition, which has,
by all appearances, been growing. Bumper stickers and yard signs are out. A
political consultant has been hired to publicize a campaign aimed at
scuttling mining plans. Last week, the same board that voted to sell mineral
rights to the Colt Coal Co. voted 17-4 to put the matter on the November
ballot: Shall the company’s planned mine be allowed in Montgomery
County? By themselves, county officials don’t have the
power to stop the proposed mine, but the Illinois General Assembly does. If
county voters say nay, state Rep. Gary Hannig, D-Gillespie, promises to
push for a bill applying only to Montgomery County that would prohibit a
type of mining that is fast becoming the method of choice throughout a
state that sits atop one of the biggest deposits of coal in the nation. “It’s the good old democratic way of
deciding things,” Hannig says. “Both sides have a fair
chance.” Farmers are facing powerful interests. Besides Colt
Coal, which is paying $7.2 million for the mineral rights and promises
additional royalties to the county that could add up to another $3 million
per year, state government is on the side of mining companies that receive
millions of dollars in public subsidies to encourage the sort of mining the
farmers oppose. “Money’s driving this,” says Mark
Bertolino, whose family has been farming in Montgomery County since the
1830s. “We haven’t had any vigilante rallies or burned
anybody’s house, but emotions are running high and so is patience. I
hope everything is going to be resolved in some sort of peaceful manner
— but I’m worried.” Bertolino was thinking more about corn than coal
when some workers showed up on his property in the summer of 2004. “They wanted to drill on my land,” he
recalls. “That was the first I’d ever heard of this.” Bertolino farms about 3,000 acres, and the workers
wanted to gauge just how much coal might be under his corn, soybeans, and
wheat. Bertolino started checking deeds and discovered that the rights to
the coal beneath his land had been sold long before he was born. As early as 1906, speculators bought the rights to
mine beneath hundreds of thousands of acres throughout central Illinois.
Save for Montana, there is more coal here than in any other state. There
are more BTUs in Illinois coal, experts figure, than in all the petroleum
reserves of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia combined. Put another way, we have
enough coal to supply electricity to 6 million homes for 500 years. It’s a resource that’s gone largely
untapped, especially since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990.
Because of its high sulfur content, Illinois coal can’t be burned in
power plants without using expensive scrubbers that remove sulfur dioxide.
Coal production has plummeted from 62 million tons in 1990 to roughly half
that amount today, but production has increased slightly during the past
two years as utility companies and municipalities either install scrubbers
or build new plants that can burn local coal and still meet federal
standards. Springfield’s new power plant, scheduled to go online in
2009, will be able to burn high-sulfur coal. Coal companies saw it coming. About five years ago,
they began scouting central Illinois, leasing, buying, and acquiring
options on coal rights that went into public ownership after previous
owners either quit paying taxes on them or negotiated the transfer of
rights to counties to avoid paying taxes. In Montgomery County, for
example, Chevron and Exxon about 10 years ago paid the county roughly
$60,000 to get rid of rights on 120,000 acres that the County Board sold to
Colt for $7.2 million in 2004. Besides Colt, IEC (Montgomery) LLC, a
corporation that appears to be based in Alabama, acquired mining rights for
85,000 acres in Montgomery County in 2003. Just who owns IEC is a mystery.
Scott Helmholz, a Springfield lawyer who represented IEC in a lawsuit filed
by Montgomery County landowners, did not return a phone call from Illinois Times. Phillip Gonet,
president of the Illinois Coal Association, says he doesn’t know
who’s behind IEC, although Helmholz once called him to discuss mining
issues. “I said, ‘Who are you representing?’ ”
Gonet recalls. “He said, ‘I can’t tell you.’
” It’s this sort of secrecy that has farmers
worried. “For my people, it’s very troubling that promises are
being made by entities that exist on paper and that no one has heard
of,” says Patrick Shaw, a Springfield lawyer who represents
Montgomery County landowners opposed to proposed mines. “From the
mine’s perspective, they will have to have somebody on paper who is
the operator of the mine and has a paper trail that the state can track.
But it’s not comforting for folks who live there who have long-term
interests.” Few landowners wanted the coal rights when they went
on the block. In Bond County, for instance, John Davis, who owns 10 acres,
was one of the few who went down to the courthouse and wrote a check after
spotting a sale notice in the local newspaper. He paid less than $100 about
four years ago. “They didn’t know it was for sale, most of the
people,” says Davis, who now fears that the value of his property
will drop if the land around his is mined. The Bond County Board has since leased coal rights on
60,000 acres to Colt, the same company that acquired mining rights in
Montgomery and surrounding counties so that it and its affiliated companies
now control mining rights on more than a quarter-million acres in Illinois.
Colt is a subsidiary of Cline Resource and Development, based in West
Virginia. Company owner Chris Cline owns or has interests in at least 16
mines in Appalachia, according to records at the West Virginia secretary of
state’s office and the federal Office of Surface Mining. Coal-trade
publications and public records portray Cline as a hard-nosed operator who
plays for high stakes and keeps insiders guessing about where he’ll
go and what he’ll do next. In 1999, he closed down a West Virginia
mine on the same day workers voted to unionize, then reopened it without
union workers. In 2004, he contributed $30,000 to a group that helped
defeat a reelection bid by a West Virginia Supreme Court justice who was
considered hostile to coal-mining interests and gave another $19,500 to
state legislative and judicial candidates from both parties. Cline’s companies are privately owned, so his
finances and future plans are largely a matter of conjecture, and no one
from headquarters in West Virginia returned a phone call. But Cline appears
to be shifting his focus from Appalachia to Illinois. In 2001, just as
interest was picking up in Illinois coal, Cline started doing business with
ArcLight Capital, a Boston investment firm with $2.5 billion in capital.
According to the coal-trade press, ArcLight has purchased at least five of
Cline’s mines in West Virginia, although West Virginia and federal
records show that Cline is still president of those mining concerns. Last
summer, ArcLight announced the formation of a new company called Magnum
Coal, which would take over four of those West Virginia mines. ArcLight and
Cline have also been doing business together in Illinois. Last year,
Steelhead Development, a Cline-owned company, announced plans to supply
coal to a proposed plant near Marion that would convert coal to natural
gas. The proposed plant would be built by a company owned by ArcLight,
which has also announced plans to build a coal-gasification plant elsewhere
in Illinois on a site yet to be selected. Cline-controlled companies are
already building a mine in Williamson County and have applied for permits
for another in Franklin County. Money and savvy like this make Bertolino and other
farmers nervous. They’re not opposed to mining per se, they say;
it’s the way coal would be taken out of the ground that has them in
an uproar. “It boils down to love of the land or love of
the money,” says Randy Singler, chairman of the Montgomery County
Farm Bureau’s conservation committee. Even the most extreme environmentalist has to
admit that longwall mining is a technological marvel. Miners assemble huge machines hundreds of feet
beneath the earth’s surface. The machines munch up coal seams in
swaths more than 1,000 feet wide and three miles long, taking out virtually
every nugget of coal and sending it to the surface on conveyor belts. The
machines can gobble up 750 acres in a year’s time. Once the coal seam
is gone, the ground collapses in the machinery’s wake. In Montgomery
County, geologists figure, the surface will sink more than 4 feet as the
earth above the excavated coal fills the void. You don’t have to be a scientist to imagine
what kind of effect this can have on buildings and roads, not to mention
flat-as-a-pancake farmland. Farmers are worried that their fields will turn
into wetlands. Folks with wells fear that their water will dry up. Bottom
line, they’re afraid that longwall mining will, at best, be an
expensive headache and, at worst, make farming impossible. Longwall mining,
they say, is essentially a manmade earthquake that will change the
topography of the land forever. Montgomery County farmers don’t have to go far
to see what can happen. In neighboring Macoupin County, the Monterey Coal
Co., a subsidiary of Exxon, has been longwall mining since 1994. Thousands
of snow geese rise as single cloud from acreage that’s become a lake.
Roads are cracked and closed. Storage sheds are noticeably tilted. There
hasn’t been much controversy because Monterey bought the farmland
under which its mine has gone, underscoring just how much money the coal is
worth. “No Trespassing” signs are posted outside boarded-up
farmhouses sitting atop cracked foundations. “Prior to this, this ground was worth
$4,000 to $5,000 [an acre],” says David Pastrovich, chairman of the
Montgomery County Soil and Water Conservation District. “Now, I
wouldn’t give you $1,500 for it.” Proponents of longwalling say that this can be fixed.
With enough ditches and culverts, they say, the land will be drained and
become good as new. Dan Barkley, an engineer and land subsidence expert
with the Office of Mines and Minerals in the Illinois Department of Natural
Resources, notes that longwall mining has been going on in Illinois since
the 1970s. “I think it’s important to point out that what the
people are looking at in Macoupin County is not the final product,”
Barkley says. “That’s temporary, and it will be
repaired.” Colt Coal hasn’t yet applied for a state mining
permit in Mongomery County. When — and if — it does, the
Department of Natural Resources will require the company to either post a
bond or obtain liability insurance to cover damages if the land isn’t
restored, state officials say. If a house, barn, or other structure is
damaged, the company must repair, replace, or pay fair value to the owner.
The company must also compensate farmers for the value of any crops lost
while mining is under way, they say. In any event, the state and legal experts say, mining
can’t proceed unless the mining company has subsidence rights for a
given piece of property. Who owns the subsidence rights depends on what was
included in mineral rights sold as long as a century ago. Typically, deeds
for coal that include subsidence rights say that the owner of the coal has
the power to remove coal “without liability for damages to the
surface.” Farmers contend that “damages to the
surface” has an entirely different meaning in today’s world of
longwalling than it did in the early part of the 20th century, when
cave-ins were unintentional. They say that they could live with an
occasional sinkhole, but not a wholesale collapsing of the earth, no matter
how much Colt Coal is willing to pay or what assurances state officials
might offer. “I don’t want compensation — I want my land
like the Lord created it,” Pastrovich says. Colt has subsidence rights to about 40 percent of the
120,000 acres for which it possesses coal rights. Nonetheless, James
Morris, vice president of the mining company, says that mining can proceed.
“We believe there’s adequate areas of land [to mine], number
one,” he says. “Secondly, we believe we can offer a deal
that’s attractive to surface owners. With people who are very
familiar with longwall mining, it’s not a difficult sales job.
Longwalling accounts for a little over 10 percent of the coal produced in
the United States. That’s right at 100 million tons a
year.” But longwall mining has come under fire in
Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where, environmentalists say, mines have
disrupted stream flows, dried up ponds, polluted aquifers, and permanently
damaged historic buildings. New longwall mines are rarely permitted in West
Virginia, where Cline raised industry eyebrows in 2000 when he applied for,
and eventually got, a permit for a new longwall operation. Pennsylvania
environmental officials have also slowed down permitting. The coal industry
dismisses such concerns in Illinois, saying that the topography and geology
are entirely different. “There has not been ruined property or ruined
farmland because of longwall mining in Illinois,” says Gonet, the
head of the Illinois Coal Association. “Comparing Illinois to
Pennsylvania is like apples to oranges.”In Illinois, the state is actively encouraging
longwalling and other forms of mining. The state last year passed laws
aimed at making it easier for companies to sell gas extracted from coal.
The state in 2005 also made new coal-gasification plants eligible for state
tax incentives and passed a law encouraging the use of waste from coal
combustion to be recycled into road-paving material. The state has pledged
at least $800 million in financing for new coal-fired energy plants. Beyond
that, the state regularly hands out millions of dollars in subsidies to
coal mines. Last year, Gov. Rod Blagojevich gave about $15 million in
grants to the mining industry, including nearly $1 million to the Monterey
Coal Company in Macoupin County to upgrade longwalling equipment. Jobs justify the subsidies, according to the
government and the coal industry. “We’d have a couple hundred
people employed here,” Morris says. The company wants to start
digging as soon as 2008, he says. Colt also hopes to find a partner to
build a gasification plant, a project that could cost $1 billion or more. With jobs and that kind of money at stake, even
opponents of longwall mining aren’t sure that the County Board would
make a different decision if it could vote again on selling coal rights.
“There are folks who are very much for this coal mine coming
in,” says George Blankenship, one of two County Board members who
voted against selling the coal rights. “There would be a lot more
talk and discussion about it, but there’s a lot more other folks than
there are farmers.” Scott Schluckebier, whose family farms 1,500 acres,
says that a split has developed between farmers and townsfolk in the
county. “The town people are thinking we’re against the
mines,” he says. “People think we’re anti-jobs.
We’re not. We just want to be treated fairly. A mine would be great
for the economy in Montgomery County — but if you dig a trench that
big, you’re forever changing the landscape of the earth.”Time and again, farmers say that they wouldn’t
object to room-and-pillar mining, a more traditional form of extraction
that takes out slightly more than half of the coal and leaves the rest
behind to support the earth. That’s not realistic because of
economics and geology, Gonet says. “With room-and-pillar, you leave behind 50 to
55 percent of the coal — if you have a nonrenewable resource, it
makes sense to take more of it,” Gonet says. Monterey Coal officials
did not return a call from Illinois Times, but Gonet says that the company switched to longwall
mining in the mid-1990s because it was too difficult to stabilize the roofs
in more traditional mining operations. Although he speaks for the coal industry, Gonet says
he expects that Colt will largely be on its own in the longwall referendum
campaign in Montgomery County. After all, he notes, coal companies are in
competition with each other, and the resource in Montgomery County belongs
to Colt. Sounding like a man who’s discovered that a lump of coal in
a stocking isn’t all bad, Gonet says that an election isn’t so
bad. “After some reflection, I think it’s a
good thing,” he says. “This is a referendum on jobs. We’ll see
how the total population of Montgomery County feels about longwall mining.
I think there’s a silent majority out there that we really
haven’t heard from.”

Comments

Old Comments

I was bullied into signing a contract. I was informed if I did not sign it they would turn it over to their attorney and I would get less than 1/3 of what they offered and they would still get their way. I felt I was given no choice being a single mom of three with very limited income. They are presently mining under our property and put a shaft right next door to me. As of right now the ground under my place has given away there are crevices in my front yard that are about 2 feet deep and 3 feet wide and the ones under my place are even deeper. The ones in my back yard destroyed my above ground pool and are at least 10 feet wide in places. my pond has tripled in size. The mine refuses to buy me out or relocate me. I refused to sign a noise waiver last year and they talked to me like I was stupid that I would get $100 for just a signature and could not understand why I would not do it to receive that $100. Before signing the contract they said they would sale me a double wide for $1 if I move it and even wrote down a mover for me and took me to see the double wide, this was on a friday. Monday I received a call and they denied saying they would sale me the double wide yet I still have in their hand writing the mover, and if that was the case why would they of taken me to see it. but they got what they wanted a signed contract which they said if I did not sign they would turn it over to their attorney and they will end up getting what they want and me with less than 1/3 of their little offer. Now my home is unstable to return to and my ground has dropped tremendously. They still won't buy me out or trade properties. I felt bullied and forced into signing a contract and I told them this at the time of signing. I was very much under duress and felt threatened if I did not sign it I would lose what was mine anyway. This is an awful way to conduct business. Chris Cline if you own Williamson Energy you should be ashamed of bullying people like myself to line your own pocket and screw us.